How can an expanded community right-to-know program help the public promote and track pollution prevention efforts at industrial plants?

When industrial facilities began reporting waste data to the TRI in 1987, public access to this information gave plants a powerful incentive to reduce their releases of toxic chemicals. Over the years, the TRI has become the primary ­ and arguably the only ­ indicator of environmental performance at many of the nation’s largest manufacturing plants. However, because the TRI tracks only the generation of toxic wastes and their direct releases into the environment, facilities that report to the TRI tend to focus on minimizing “end-of-pipe” wastes and releases rather than overall toxic chemical use.

While some waste minimization measures involve real pollution prevention -- such as switching to less toxic industrial feedstocks -- industrial facilities often choose to reduce their releases by other means. Pollution controls, for example, may minimize wastes but do not necessarily eliminate the environmental and health risks associated with manufacturing and transporting toxic chemicals, or with using and disposing of the products that contain them.

By itself, TRI data does not enable users to determine whether a facility is minimizing its wastes and releases through pollution controls or through real pollution prevention. In contrast, a reporting system that tracks a facility’s actual uses of toxic chemicals provides a much stronger incentive for facilities to implement true internal pollution prevention measures, since these will reduce the types and quantities of toxic chemicals they have to report to the public.

In New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Eugene, Oregon, data reported on the total amount of a chemical used or released per unit of product (such as a gallon of paint) can be used to identify plants where pollution prevention efforts could improve manufacturing efficiency and reduce the use of toxic chemicals. Similarly, data on the quantity of product manufactured each year can be used to determine whether decreases in the amount of a toxic chemical released to the environment or incorporated in products are the result of real reductions in its use or merely the result of reduced production.

Equipped with this kind of information, community, worker, environmental, and consumer groups in states with expanded right-to-know programs can begin to ask questions about the need for toxic chemicals at local plants, how they are used, and the steps being taken to ensure their safe handling and reduce or eliminate opportunities for exposure during transport, processing, disposal, and recycling.